17. 10.
I downloaded the update for itunes a week or so ago and since then I’ve been playing with the new function those nice people at Apple have created for me. To begin with you need to let Apple do some digging into your music library and once that has been done a new sidebar appears on the right hand side of your iTunes program. When you select a song to play the Genius sidebar will show a selection of albums and songs from the iTunes store for the artist you selected, it also shows a load of similar songs you might like. But the wickedest thing that this new Genius sidebar can do is create playlists for you.
All you need to do is select a starting song from your library then click the little genius button which is down the bottom of the right hand side. iTunes then does some funkyness and creates you a playlist of 25 songs similar to the song you first chose. After a few weeks of playing with it I’m really impressed and its really helping me listen to songs I would have normally overlooked, so cheers Apple another great creation! I highly recommend you get the update to iTunes 8.
28. 08.
I was just eating my lunch while watching the news on the beeb, I just don’t get how stupid our prison system is in the UK. I was watching a story about the guy Grant Wilkinson who was busted for running the biggest dodgy gun making factory ( here is the link to the story on Current TV ) ever discovered in the UK ( obviously not heard of BAE Systems then, just as bad in my eyes ). Anyway this cretin is thought to have been responsible for converting the gun that killed PC Sharon Beshenivsky in a failed robbery in Bradford last year, amongst many other crimes…. so good riddance to him.
So I’m watching this story on the news and the reported says “he has been given a Life Sentence and will serve a minimum of 11 years” Excuse my French but WTF!!!! I know in America Life is Life.. but come on a minimum of 11 years, what is that about if someone gets life it should be a minimum of 30+ years, talk about leniency and stupidity, what has happened to the criminal system of this great country?……
Tags: , Gun Factory, Life Sentance
12. 08.
A while back we go Sky HD, having never had Sky before it was strange to have so many channels all of a sudden. After weeks of trying to suss out which channels were good ( a few ) and which were pants ( lots ) I happened across “Current TV” one day. For a good few weeks my girlfriend and me watched loads of Current TV, which is a totally random selection of small little programs on a multitude subjects. I have to admit though I forgot about it and I stopped watching…
Recently I’ve been trying out Twitter.com and one of the people I’ve been following happens to work for Current TV. So I went and had a look at their website and so far I’m happily impressed, I’ve just watched a 40 min concert by Sigur Ros at the Musem of Modern Art in New York a band I’ve been wanting to hear more of.
So yes please take a look at their site and you can watch the TV channel at 193 on Sky and 155 on Virgin. You can also add your own videos to the Current TV website.
Tags: Current News, Current TV
11. 08.
Well it takes me ages to decide on a theme for a blog, I have to say I do enjoy doing this though, but the problem is that I find it hard to decide on one. Before I started to tinker with the template here at www.SimonHoughton.com I was running the Tranquility white theme by Geoff Stearns which is a really nice theme, here take a look…
This was a nice theme but I need to inspire myself to actually use this blog, I have a lot to teach and share with the world, I’m on a quest to learn everything so I might have the odd bit of advice for someone out there. Unfortunatly for you lot, I’ve been slack recently what with being a Dad… yada yada.. getting in the way… I’ve let this blog go forgotten. Not anymore!
So in order to inspire this great content to splurge out of me onto this here simonhoughton blog, I needed a fresh new theme.
When choosing a Wordpress theme most people just go to http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ and I will admit there are 100’s of worthy themes to be had there, but I’ve found a load of other sites which I think have a better selection.
The theme I have currently ( well currently while I write ) is the dreamworks redux 1.1 which I found at a great little site www.wpsnap.com here is a pic of it ( just incase I’ve gone and changed it )…
As soon as I saw this theme, I liked it, most dark theme’s are hard to read, but this theme has the right shading for easy reading. So for the time being I’m using this one, its great. I need to work out how to alter it so it show excerpts instead of the full posts on the homepage.
10. 08.
I used to be a Photographic Retoucher, I still do it occasionally every now and then, but most of the time my focus is currently on Web Design and Marketing. When I was a Retoucher I enjoyed listening to Audio Books while I retouched photographs, a liking I picked up from a freelance retouched we had in to work who was very fond of Audio books, her interest sparked my interest and I soon opened an account with Audible.com.
That was over 5 years ago and I’ve been using Audible and enjoying reading while I work ever since. I checked my iTunes audio book section the other day and was happy to see 141 items all of which I’ve bought from Audible.
Last year I finally decided to get an Audible.co.uk account as I was getting frustrated with books not being available to me from the US store. I’m currently reading, well quite a few books at the moment, but the main Audio Book I’m currently listening to is “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson.
I’m going to try and do more posts on the subject of Audio books from now on as I need to use this blog for something! I’d got board of it for a while but I now want to make something of this!
29. 04.
If you missed it read the first part of this post here - Social Networking and how its changing the internet - Part 1
Social networking is easy and it is fun. It is a way that you can enhance your online business and have a lot of fun in the process. You can meet some of your very best potential customers on social networking sites. You can make friends and influence people as well.
It has long been a well established fact that more business is actually conducted in social settings than in offices.
More deals are made on golf courses than in board rooms in the real world and more sales are made through the use of social networking sites on the Internet than through all of the paid-for advertising combined.
People HATE commercials but they don’t mind hearing their friends recommend a product or service. Not only do they not mind…they even go to a lot of trouble to seek out that information.
In addition to being a great way to advertise a business social networking sites are also a great research tool and one that should never be overlooked. Rather than having to conduct a lot of expensive and time-consuming surveys for example, you can simply look through a social networking site and find out exactly what people are thinking about.
You can find out what their problems are and what measures they are taking to solve those problems. You can find out what their interests are and how they go about pursuing those interests.
By using social networking sites as research tools, you can likely get more and better information in a single hour and for free than you could get by spending hours on sending out surveys and trying to decipher the results.
One very interesting social networking site is called 43 things. That is the name of the site. On this social networking site people list their goals and then other people with similar goals discuss how to best achieve those goals.
Some goals that have been listed are ‘learn a foreign language, be a good parent, improve my memory, get in shape, lose weight, be a better gardener and the list just goes on and on.
As a research tool it would be hard to beat 43 things to find out what people are interested in and concerned about.
Web 2.0 is great! It is driven by those who actually USE the internet and not by people who are sitting behind desks at large companies and who are out of touch with the real world.
Social networking is simply a group of like-minded people exchanging information that is of mutual interest. That is all it is and all it has ever been.
It is important that when you are using social networking sites that you remember this and conduct yourself accordingly.
If you join a site and start just posting blatant advertisements, you are not going to be doing social networking.
You are simply doing advertising…which people hate. If you establish yourself as part of a group, then you are social networking and you will find that those who are members of your online social circle are the best help you can find anywhere.
Social networking is valuable in and of itself but it can be made doubly valuable by using social networking in conjunction with social bookmarking.
Join a social networking website. Find a group of people who are interested in the topic of your website but don’t start out advertising that.
Make posts to your own blog on the social networking sites as well as to the blogs of others. Add those links to your social bookmarking account. Be certain that you use the appropriate key words in those tags otherwise they are worthless.
Altogether this is an excellent marketing strategy. It is a way to market your website and your products or services and have a lot of fun at the same time. You will meet people that you really do like and even admire and respect.
Friendships are not made for the purpose of profiting from them but they usually are profitable.
If you missed it read the first part of this post here - Social Networking and how its changing the internet - Part 1
Tags: Social networking, Social bookmarking
Simon Houghton